tufte-visual-confectionslisted

# Visual Confections: Juxtapositions from the Ocean of the Streams of Story ## Overview A confection is a single picture that gathers many separate image-events — some real, some imagined — and juxtaposes them on the flat page to make a point, narrate, explain, or list. It is neither a faithful scene (map, photograph) nor data poured into a standard format (chart, table); it is concocted on purpose, "showing all at once what never has been together" (p.127). The discipline matters because confections are the native form for explanatory posters, mixed-media dashboards, infographic narratives, and content-first interfaces — and they live or die on the quality of the thinking behind them, not the cleverness of the assembly. ## §1. What a confection is — and is not **Tufte's model (the "Ocean of the Streams of Story," borrowed from Rushdie; definitions p.121):** - An **event** = the intersection of a noun and a verb (subject + action) — *something happens*. - A **plane of events** = one time-slice holding every noun-verb combination at that instant. - A **story** = a progression of noun-verb incidents — one strand running through time. - An **image sequence** (Marey, Muybridge) = a short stretch of a *single* strand. - A **confection** = an assembly of many image-events selected from *different* strands, lifted out and juxtaposed on the still flatland of paper. What a confection does with that material: illustrate an argument, enforce visual comparisons, combine the real and